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Trados_Getting Started

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CandyWorking in a translation agency, you need to learn how to use Trados which is one of the most popular and important translation tools in the time being. For me, as a totally new blood pour into this field, I have my own story about how to get familiar with this tool, and use it to work for me. There is a saying that nothing is difficult if you put your heart on it, besides, this is not a complex software.
To know about Trados, let’s first check relative information about translation software as well as its background history. Nowadays, translation software in this internet era was generally divided into three types:
1. Electronic dictionary (E-dictionary), such as domestic Jinshan, Oriental has this kind of product; its main function is bidirectional query terms.
2. Machine Translation, the main difference between electronic dictionaries is that it can achieve full text translation. There are famous foreign brands like Logomedia and Systran, but many domestic electronic dictionary software also has this function.
3. Due to the limited function of electronic dictionary, it cannot meet our high expectations. Plus poor translation quality of machine translation is far behind human translation, then the 3rd generation software comes into being, that is computer aided translation software, i.e. CAT
OK, let’s talk about CAT:
The main function of CAT is to provide a high efficiency platform for translators to realize a satisfactory translation result by a method of combining PC fast processing speed (find, replace, tips etc.) with human’s rich experience and the final reviewer.
Trados is one type of CAT products; it’s the mainstream CAT products currently appeared in market, so everyone was scramble for it. Overseas similar products are SDLX, Dejavu and so on; and domestic famous brand is" elegant letter" equals to “雅信”.
Why Trados is so famous? For it initially created the concept of TM（Translation Memory）and successfully took into practice. More importantly, it first realized commercialization. To tell the truth, China start to analyze PC translation as early as 60 ages or even earlier time, but our research didn’t achieve commercialization.
The simplified define for translation memory refers to the record of translator’s working process, and put it into two main dat bases, one is sentence corpus (not the same as sentences) and another one is term database(not exactly equal to dictionary). TM reminds you and helps you when you come to translation the same term or sentence which you did before, as long as this term or sentence recorded in the TM, the translation result will come out automatically for you.
New learners need to pay special attention in Trados for it’s just like a blank paper without any word or sentence and open its mouth waiting for you to feed it when you first use this tool. So do not try to operate this tool in the same way like FastAIT, a totally different usage. Moreover, if you just want a tool to do everything for you, then the following information is not your interest as what I’m trying to talk is really on the other way.
Why to use CAT software like Trados? For it can avoid repeat work, even more, to sharing information with different translators. Presume that there are mass of wonderful source material in your database, just like a master standing beside you to guide your work and give you good suggestions, and never tired of reminding, don‘t you think this is such a good feeling.
Where can you get Trados? Official website of Trados provide you huge valuable materials and available for down load free of charge, you could access to Trados via HYPERLINK . Through office website, you could save a lot of time and energy for searching on all kinds of different webs, may even take the risk of receiving wrong information.
Classified by product function, Trados can be divided into translation memory platform (Workbench) and term management platform (Multiterm), and its respective auxiliary tool sets. For novice you should keep one thing in mind that: to achieve high efficiency work, you need to combine the use of two platforms.
Divided by file exchange, Trados usually support three formats, one is variety file formats from its previous version, then is text format, and the last type is Excel format. I suggest you just care about the last format, as Excel format is the most common one, but also the most flexible one.
To be continued…